


The American Century

by The_Whelk



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 20th Century, Activism, Alternate History, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Cold War, Complete, Democratic Socialism, Encyclopedia, Gay Rights, Gen, Historical References, Infinity Gems, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Real People from history I don't like are all HYDRA just go with it, Senator Rogers, Socialism, Soviet Union, Steve does a Socialism, Steve is literally an Antifa supersolider, Steven Strange Was Right, Strategic Scientific Reserve, Time Travel, alt history, casual but strident leftism, spy stuffs, the timeline is getting wrecked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-10 02:09:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14727957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Whelk/pseuds/The_Whelk
Summary: Thanos' biggest problem is that he thinks he's clever. Steve gets a chance to make everything right.





	1. Chapter 1

Steve Rogers, broken, battered, bent over and knee deep in the Wakandan dirt, forced himself up to look at his enemy. This purple thing. This Thanos. 

“He’s just a man.” He thought. Steve willed his limbs to move, every sinew creaking and screaming against it. “He’s just a man.”

Thanos noticed Steve’s charge toward him like you might notice a fly out of the corner of your eye. He twisted his wrist . “Ah, the man out of time.” Thanos twisted his wrist again.

And then Steve was gone. 

\------------

It was, to everyone’s agreement, a terrible meeting. It was long. It was drawn out. No one agreed with anyone and half the people didn’t even agree with themselves. To make matters worse they still had to meet in damp bunkers or offices or back rooms or 4H halls. Considering the work they did, it felt rather undignified. The bureaucrats, the scientists, the politicians, they all thought the same thing; This was no way to run a railroad. As they all got up and put their hats on and papers away, Col. Phillips, seated, piped up. 

“Have we settled on an agenda going forward?”

The group stood at him and blinked.

“I see here a lot of ideas but not a lot of plans. What I’m asking is, what is the next actionable agenda item when we all meet again - wherever that is?”

The group stood for a bit until they were knocked back by loudest noise they’d ever heard.

On the middle of the floor of the 4H hall was Captain Steve Rogers, tumbling over from a mid-run pose, the sonic boom of his arrival blowing away papers and pushing flags to the wall. 

A bureaucrat in olive drab ran to steady him, watching out for the sharper points of his strange black gauntlets. Rogers, woozy, let the gauntlets fall to the floor as he grabbed the lapels of the officer helping him to his feet.

“Where-? What” Steve saw the brass pin in the lapel, the stylized eagle from his own dress officer uniform with three small letters: SSR.

“What year is it?”

The officer, his name lost to history, said simply. “ It’s 1946 Captain.”


	2. Domestic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been A Member Of HYDRA?"

There were, of course, questions.

First and rather predictability for a room full of spies and bureaucrats, what authority did he fall under? After checking MIA rules and regulations they concluded Steve was still in the employ of the SSR specifically and the US Military generally.

Steve helpfully added that, with the exception of Col. Phillips, he outranked everyone else there.

As for where he’d been? He never told. He said he was in a “dark place” for a while and then found himself here and it was possibly related to the glowing blue cube. Also, have they found the glowing blue thing? Could he see the glowing blue thing? The subject of the glowing blue cube came up a lot. 

But when it came to what to do next, Steve had no questions. Steve had a plan. It arrived in his head the instant after he popped into existence in that 4H hall and had the one wish he never told anyone else about granted. You only get one second chance he figured, and he wasn’t going to waste it.

But first there was the problem of him being dead for the last year or so. He can’t just show up again. There was a parade. People cried. Captain America merchandise flew off shelves. TIME magazine did a special issue (which only mentioned one bomb headed toward the US, not seven, and carefully omitted the Red Skull stuff). Steve was not ready to be back in the public eye. For his plan to work, people would have to think he was dead for a little while longer - plus, he didn’t want to make any more changes to the timeline then he had to. He read ‘The Time Machine ‘ as a kid, he knew what was up. 

Everyone else agreed. For the time being, Captain America belongs dead. Steve was used to the feeling.

Despite being dead, Steve immediately set to making critical and sweeping changes to SSR’s direction and organizational structure. He, along with Howard Stark and Chester Phillips, formed a directional council and drafted a preliminary founding document securing SSR and any future organization derived from it to protecting the freedom and liberty of all peoples. Steve had them include ‘all peoples’ cause he knew, thanks to a wiki-binge in 2011, that there was was an attempt to merge SSR/SHIELD into more United Nations focused endeavor that was blocked, in part, due to the nationalist bent of the proto-SHIELD. Steve needed any organization he was a part of to have full potential future international cooperation for his plan to work. 

The second thing he did was request Peggy Carter return from the Los Angeles office following her successful take down of ZODIAC and join the council as a sitting international liaison. She accepted, via secure telegram, after asking twice if this was a joke and that if it was, it wasn’t funny.

Steve met Peggy in Penn station as she got off the train from Newark. The station was a big, airy white affair, modeled after the Roman baths of Caracalla and topped with vaulted glass ceilings. It was flat and open as a stage when Peggy, in sunglasses and California sun-lightened hair, walked up to Steve flanked by two guards in plain clothes.

“I don’t like it.” She took off her sunglasses, gesturing them to his beard. “It ages you terribly.”

Steve smiled so hard his eyes hurt.“I’m older than you think.”

“I thought women were supposed to lie about their age. You know it’s very selfish what you did. Dying and all. I mourned you and now you get to come back and gloat. It’s like Huck Finn and his fake funeral.”

“I never read Huck Finn.”

“You, of all people, have never read Huckleberry Finn? Rogers what are we going to do with you?” Peggy put her glasses back on. “Right, so - saving the world?”

“Nothing but.”

“Brilliant.” 

Margaret ‘Peggy’ Carter was the 4th and last founding member of the new SSR push drafted by Steve Rogers himself. The goal was simple. Expose and eliminate fascist HYDRA influence at every level of civic life at home and aboard.

Arnim Zola was easy. He was still in a facility in New Mexico being “educated” to American life. Rogers believed in publicity, not secrecy, so arrests of former high-level HYDRA scientists employed by the US government made headlines. The phrase of 1946 was “Have you ever knowingly given aid, assist, or comfort to a HYDRA officer, agent, or affiliated organization?”

An unremarkable senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was forced to resign after it came out he tried to commute death sentences for 44 captured HYDRA officials. Carter lead an inquiry and successful capture of a HYDRA ring operating out of Cambridge with ties to Yale. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was put under investigation and forced out when HYDRA materials and code pads were found among the artifacts of his associate Roy Cohn following Cohn’s apparent suicide. Howard Stark, to everyone's surprise, publicly identified his friend and fellow rich-person Fred C. Koch, head of Roxxon Oil and Gas, as a HYDRA donor. The US Government, under the aegis of SSR, seized most of Koch and Roxxon’s assets, leading to further investigations, and a permanent fund for operations. Roxxon became, in effect, the first nationalized American oil and gas company. Stark was put in charge. He hated it. 

Steve wanted to push into the Black Widow and Winter Soldier programs abroad but Russia was a black box, smooth and seamless. He'd have to be content with domestic policy.

Later, Steve learned Peggy was engaged and had been for the past 4 months. He remained civil and friendly but aloof. He did the same with Howard and everyone else he knew from “before”. It was too easy to let something slip, too easy to get caught up in emotion. Seeing them and talking to them, it all felt too unreal, like he was having a vivid dream or replaying the past in his head. It was easier to focus on the plan. If his friends think he’s distant, so be it. It's not like he doesn’t have a reason to be. It was weird enough that Jarvis was an actual person he got to meet from time to time and not a disembodied Voice-turned-robot-turned-villain-turned ally. Tony made so much more sense in retrospect. 

Rather than meet in moldy halls and secret backrooms, Steve got them, if not a place in the U.N, then an affiliated location near 47th street called ‘The Erskine Annex.’ Steve implemented a no smoking policy. It was one of the things he liked about the future and wanted to jump-start. 

By late winter 1947 Steve Rogers was the successful shadow director of a shadow organization located off the books of all US and International governments with a blank check to pursue any project they saw fit.

So he started blowing stuff up.

In the South Pacific Steve gathered teams of scientists organized under SSR to do one thing and one thing only: destroy the Tesseract. After much pleading and letting exactly one secret about the future drop, Steve got Howard to give up the glowing blue cube so Steve could find a way to destroy it. 

They threw bomb after bomb after bomb at it. Steve hated that he couldn’t tell anyone the bombs kept getting bigger not cause of an arms race, but because he was trying to to stop a future genocide, but he pressed on. Carter brought in her experience with the Zero Matter bomb which ended up cracking the case of the Tesseract and exposing the infinity Space stone within. For justification, Stark’s Roxxon Oil And Gas concern was given a mandate to use the data gathered to look into nuclear power generation over fossil fuels.

In May 1947, on operation Tinker, the detonation of a hybrid Nuclear/Zero Matter bomb successfully destroyed an infinity stone at the cost of the island of Nauru. Following this action, Steve Rogers went into seclusion for over a year. Peggy Carter took lead as chair, continuing her predecessor’s anti-fascist stance and bend toward international cooperation. 

On June 8th, 1949, Steve Rogers came out to the public as alive. He did so without telling his handlers, bosses, or friends. He gave an interview on a one-off program with Studs Terkel for WFMT Chicago where he mostly talked about growing up poor in Brooklyn and the promises of the New Deal and effect it had on him and his friends. He was on the cover of TIME again. He gave a lengthy talk where he said the most American thing you can be is anti-war. It sold out within a week. He didn’t spend half of his tour with showgirls to not learn about publicity and putting on a good show. Steve then, timelines be damned, announced his run for State Senator in NY for district 25 covering Brooklyn Heights, Bed-Stuy, and his old neighborhood of Red Hook.

On November 5th 1949 Captain Steve Rogers won 71% of the vote and went to Albany with the biggest megaphone a state level politician could ask for. His fellows at SSR thought he was mad.

“Phase one complete” thought Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO many real people! I'm being very alt history nerd here - the date Steve "comes out" is the date Orwell;s 1984 was published.


	3. International

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody wants to change the world but nobody ever wants to do anything about it.

His first major act in office was dusting off the 1940 ‘Second System’ plan for the NYC Subway. A vast expansion and integration of the city’s competing lines, the Second System plan stalled due to the war and the extension of the current owners’ contracts until 1945. State Senator Rogers’ skill was pitching the plan as a public utility, as necessary as clean water, and not as a for profit company. He leaked to the press plans to double the fare and cut back on service. Steve’s first year slogan ‘Five Cents Is Fair’ made him a newspaper darling and popular with the mostly commuter voters of Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights. Detractors called him a hidebound relic of the pre-war days, someone who thought in trains and radio and not highways and television. In 1950 he was present for the groundbreaking of the Second Avenue Subway. 

His second major act in office was arranging a coup. 

Through contacts at SSR and the U.N, Rogers entered into secret communication with General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, Deputy-Commander In Chief of the 1st Belorussian Front which won the battle of Berlin and ended the war in Europe. Zhukov was maddened by the dictatorial and arbitrary rule of Stalin and his backstabbing sycophants and he held fond memories of the Howling Commandos and General Eisenhower himself. He was convinced a U.S/U.S.S.R alliance was possible if not for paranoid politicians poisoning the well.

Rogers, for all his idealism, was interested in one thing only: the location of HYDRA sites in Eurasia and Central Europe. Zhukov hinted they knew of possible Operation Winter Soldier locations in Bulgaria or Sokovia. He too worried how many satellite parties within the Soviet sphere were HYDRA puppets. How many HYDRA stay behind teams melted into post-war governments on either side? 

Rogers offered them SSR teams to infiltrate suspected cells and even some (carefully edited) data Roxxon collected on nuclear/zero matter combustions with an eye to create true fusion power generators. After all, liberated from the need for power, the Soviet people could make their own way in the world, no? Rogers even managed to hint, with a delicately he didn’t think he had, that if something unfortunate was to happen to central leadership in the future, they wouldn’t be too upset about it. 

All of this was predicated on exposing Operation Winter Soldier. It was an insane demand, but what else are you going to do when you know your universe comes with an experation date?

During these negotiations, Steve campaigned for expanded public housing, city-wide health insurance, worker-run cooperatives , and an end to the military-industrial complex. That last bit made him not so popular in shipbuilding Red Hook. 

He also fell in love.

Katherine ‘Kitt’ Desjardin, a Franco-Russo translator for the U.N Steve worked with, was a war refugee and newly minted American citizen. They had an instant attraction made closer by secret meetings and cloak-and-dagger goings on with Soviet generals and French scientists of dubious political backgrounds.

She was a member of ISL, the independent Socialist League, a breakaway branch of a breakaway branch of the old American Socialist Party. Their motto “Neither Washington Nor Moscow” sought to find a democratic answer to government that rejects all militarism and authoritarianism. Katherine gave him an unedited proof of her friend Michael's book “The Crime Of Poverty”, which moved Steve so much he asked if he could write the introduction.

“The Crime Of Poverty”, a very long, very dry discussion of the systems that keep poor people poor, was a hit. The solutions proposed, national living wage, job guarantees, housing guarantees, spun around magazines and public discussion. Steve and Katherine got married in 1952, in Prospect Park. It was fall. 

Two days later Steve got a phone call at Erskine Amex. The strike team found a Winter Soldier Base. They found Bucky. A week later Stalin and Beria dropped dead from ‘poor health’. 

The Winter Soldier base was found because the villagers of Tuusk, Sokovia, knew of a one armed man who wandered the woods and had no memories. They left out food for him if someone noticed him in the fog. HYDRA mind-control wasn’t nearly as advanced in the 50s, and the lost of their scientists around the world prevented further gains.

Or to put it another way, they kept losing Bucky. He’d escape, they’d find him, they’d knock him out, he’d come to and escape- it was like having a feral cat.

Unfortunately this blunt force method of mind control and subjection meant Bucky wasn’t lucid when rescued. Taken to a secure facility at Lenox Hill Hospital, James Buchanan Barnes fell into a stable but deep coma. Steve visited him everyday he could. Of all the things in the world time and space could take from him, this was the worst. 

Later that year the joint U.S/U.S.S.R satellite Peace/Mir launched with newly elected President Eisenhower and Premier Zhukov attending. According to reports, they talked about fishing. Meanwhile, some Roxxon/Stark tech got slipped to the higher ups of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the after-party. It was a small but powerful zero matter powered transmitter designed to send a single message halfway across the galaxy. Steve wrote the message. They were under express orders to never turn it off. It took NACA scientists a month to figure out how it worked. 

Steve entered the race for junior NY US Senator upon Irving Ives’ retirement in 1958. Party members, supporters, and the press started to whisper ....Rogers for President?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What’s a coup between friends? 
> 
> Also that fishing thing is from history, they where apparently both very ardent fishermen and bonded over it. 
> 
> Can you tell my very personal points of knowledge re: subways? In 1947 the height of all subway useage , the fare doubled from five cents to ten cents. This is widely regarded ...as a mistake. 
> 
> Steve’s plan is coming together m even if it’s not all going right. ROGERS FOR PRESIDENT! But then he’d be going against ...wait-
> 
> This 20th century is going to be a lot different.


	4. Electoral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Senator Rogers gets frustrated by national politics and nearly gets killed.

In 1958 Senator Rogers introduced a bill to repeal Taft-Hartley, the act restricting labor union power and activity. Opposition in the media said he was a bought and paid for agent of the big NYC unions, which everyone knew were corrupt anyway. Others said he did it to modify his strong anti-war stance which cost him points with construction unions dependent on defense contracts. The bill died in conference, Steve’s first frustration with national level politics.

The biggest blow to his political career came during the presidential election of 1960 when he openly endorsed Republican candidate Richard Nixon over the Democratic John F. Kennedy. While not supporting NIxon's campaign and giving praise to JFK’s civil rights advocacy, Rogers said he couldn’t in good faith endorse someone saber rattling with China and calling for increased militarism. Vietnam was, in Steve’s opinion, none of our business-nor were the skirmishes going on in central Europe within the Soviet Sphere. Everyone knew it was HYDRA remnants and generals anyway.

“If you’d seen war” he said “You’d know why I would stop at nothing to prevent it.”

It cost him a lot of good press and popularity, but his support pushed the close presidential race into Nixon’s favor. 

Nixon was a one-term president, unpopular and a frequent figure of fun in the media. He was goaded by a hostile House and Senate to pass any number of reforms and institutions, mostly by a strong, civic-minded Progressive Caucus with Steve at the head. Nixon even had to lift the Cuban embargo and remove troops from Turkey to appease the Senate. The Kennedys, broke by the cost of the campaign, threw themselves into defense industry lobbying and campaigns for local judgeships and aldermen.

In October 1962, Senator Rogers was a delegate at the Cuban Conference in Havana, a vast meeting of world leaders, activists, scientists, artists, and freethinkers in an attempt to reconcile the “Capitalist/Communist” divide. Steve’s now close friend, Michael Harrington, read from “The Crime Of Poverty”. Soviet Scientists gave demonstrations on their prototype Zero Matter Fusion Power Plants. Hank Pym, a young scientist with SSR, demonstrated a new way to protect crops from pests using EMP Communication.

The world’s fair vibe was cut short by an assassination attempt during an awards ceremony. The sniper’s bullet grazed Senator Rogers who was pushed out of the way by his presentation companion, Director Carter. She suffered minor injuries. The would-be assassin was a 32 year old US State Department clerk named Alexander Pierce who felt he had been unfairly skipped over for positions and promotions due to his conservative politics. A deeper investigation revealed ties to the John Birch Society and payments from groups linked to Hammer Industries, a struggling arms and weapons firm.

Hammer Industries executives fled to South Africa to avoid charges of inciting or antagonizing countries to war. Their remaining US assets were divided up and absorbed into Roxxon/Stark.

Despite the assassination attempt happening out of country, Rogers used it to promote stronger gun laws and a ban on ‘military style weapons’ for sale in the US alongside comprehensive gun control. It would be one of his last decisive victories.

Later that year his wife Katherine was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was given 8 months to live. Steve informally retired from his position to be with her at their house in Brooklyn Heights. Truman Capote, a frequent dinner guest, wrote an account of her illness and its effect on the Great American Hope Steve Rogers for ‘Ladies Home Journal.’

It was very moving, but it kept Steve out of public life for over a year. In 1964, he lost a narrow primary challenge to Robert F. Kennedy, who ran a much more vigorous, law-and-order driven campaign. Steve promised publically to work with the new senator as an activist to benefit all New Yorkers, but privately called him someone who knew about law but not justice. No one was talking about Rogers For President anymore. At 46, despite his youthful good looks, Rogers started to feel his age. He knew how much work needed to be done, but he was getting tired. Hadn’t he done enough? Hadn’t he killed himself twice by now? It was times like this he wished he could get drunk. He still visited Bucky in the hospital religiously, even if he thought it wasn’t doing him any good. 

Peggy Carter on the other hand, took Steve’s lead and left the SSR and moved back home to the U.K to reform their own spooky secret agencies and get involved with local politics in her home borough of Slough.

Out of office for months, in 1965 Steve formally became a dues paying member of the Independent Socialist League.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at the MCU figures in there Pym! Pierce! and yes the date of the Cuban Conference is the same date as the Cuban missile Crisis. I like to have fun. 
> 
> Harrington did not write "The Crime Of Poverty" (that's the title of an 1880s socialist religious book!) but he did form the DSA, which I'm a member of, so I made him Steve's friend. Cause I can. 
> 
> as for Peggy, this entire thing was started partly by me looting up Peggy Carter's Canonical Age and realizing ...well, you'll see


	5. Activism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve gets into Activism, Peggy gets into Politics.

The political scene by late 1965 was ....charged. White southern democrats splintering off due to civil rights, moderate republicans splintering off because of warmongering, a group of big businessmen who didn’t like either flavor of democracy and wanted to be back in control- it was a mess. Steve, with his speeches and rallies and Opinion pieces for the ISL, seemed like the only thing holding the New Deal Coalition together. 

Before now the ISL was mostly local, running independent reading groups and food pantries, helping workers form unions and supporting city council candidates. Then word came out that civil rights leaders, lead by Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin, were working with economist Philip Randolph to propose ‘A Freedom Budget For All Americans.” The omnibus bill would outline a host of big causes, from social housing to national healthcare, fair prices for farmers and the goal of abolishing poverty. It was a nationalized version of everything Steve tried to do in New York. 

Steve threw the ISL into supporting the Freedom Budget. It was all or nothing. He gave ten speeches a week. It was no different than his war bond days, he even trotted out his “Star Spangled Man” number for a few shows. Membership in the ISL and support for the Freedom Budget swelled. Steve told crowds he was never really afraid of fascists or dictators, he was afraid of collaborators, people okay with making a buck off other people’s misery. Those people can mix into nice society and their soft hands aren't covered in blood. 

“The landlord is a bully, and this country uses land to bully people into bad housing, bad neighborhoods, and bad futures.”

Steve, dragging with him his collation of white working class voters, minority groups, intellectuals, veterans, and dyed in the wool socialists, managed to get support for The Freedom Budget just over 50%. It passed by the narrowest of margins. 

Then things got wild. KKK recruitment skyrocketed. Assassination plot after assassination plot we’re uncivered. Local officials got dead rats in the mail. Steve was rushed out of a hotel room he was told was rigged with explosives. There was a foiled poison attack on the IRS with a teddy bear full of anthrax. It felt like the world was spinning out of control. 

But it didn’t. There was a lot of talk of militias and compounds and “going underground” but it just meant they kept to themselves. The radical right fringe felt less interested in politics and more interested in preparing for the millennium, when they’d finally be proven right and ascend. The centerist business class got tired of buying politicians who didn’t win them any gains. The lefty political sphere Steve inhabited was not ready for what happened next.

1968 was both the year of the first Roxxon Nuclear Power Plant in the US and the first student strike. It seemed trivial in the U.S (the strike, not the Power plant) but it kicked off a damned near revolution everywhere else. France was crippled by strikes for more fair treatment, more autonomy, more like what the U.S has. Britain's university system seized shut for an entire season to promote more enrollment from the lower classes, and the Soviet Union’s students, braver than most, protested the censorship laws and import restrictions. 

In the end, the early appeasements by the US set the tone. The protestors got mostly what they wanted. Tanks appeared, but they did not move. By 1969, the ban on foreign or subversive material in the U.S.S.R was gone. In 1970, Steve Rogers gave his first talk in St. Petersberg, talking about his friendship with Zhukov and the need for understanding and common goals across the world. He praised the tremendous gains the space race has gotten as evidense that countries can compete for glory in fields other than war. He promised that with full co-operation, an international moonbase by 1999 was inevitable. A few months after his speech, the first regional democratic elections took place in the U.S.S.R, a test run for Democratic socialist reform. 

In 1971 Lenox Hill declared Bucky Barnes brain dead. Steve buried him in Greenwood Cemetery. He couldn’t pull enough strings to get him a full military burial and honors in Arlington. At night, Steve told himself it was okay cause he still had a place he could meet him. It didn’t feel like enough. 

In 1972, pilot programs for the Roxxon Fusion Plants got most of the country off fossil fuel. The Equal Rights Amendment was ratified by the House of Representatives, and Arnie Roth contacted Steve. 

Arnie Roth was a friend from the neighborhood back in Brooklyn. He joined up at the same time, Navy, not Army, and he’d been kicking around ever since. But Arnie got into politics since he moved to California and he was wondering if Steve wanted to meet up and catch up and maybe endorse him on a few local San Francisco city council tickets.

Steve, the practical one, asked him about his politics. 

“Well I support everything you’re doing with ISL and I’m running on civil rights”

“The Castro is all working class Italians I think-”

“I’m talking gay rights Steve. I’m working on gay rights.” 

“Set up a rally on Friday, I’ll be there.”

True to his word, he was, and he supported Arnie’s 3 unsuccessful campaigns for city supervisor and his organizing of the hustlers and street kids of the neighborhood into a politically conscious force. Steve left a lot of ISL literature and encouraged the San Francisco Chapter to work with the Arnie Roth campaign, which they did, under duress. 

In 1974 Margaret “Peggy” Carter went from being various shadow ministers within the U.K Labour Party to being the Leader, partly due to her strident policy positions and partially due to her purging of vaguely pro-fascists or collaborative elements within the party. In the 1979 elections, or the “Battle of The Broads” as the papers called it, she went head to head with Tory Margaret Thatcher for control of the government. She won in part due to her friend Steve’s campaigning and her war record. 

In 1977 Arnie Roth was finally voted into city government. It was announced at an event at City Lights Books and Roth kissed Steve on the lips. The photo made the cover of TIME magazine with the headline GAY REVOLUTION. They both joked if off, but in 2002, long after Roth had been a venerable Governor of California, Steve admitted they had a long affair during his campaign for supervisor. 

In 1982 a Democratic wave swept over the national politic and the ISL-promoted candidate, former actor and Governor of Pennsylvania Jimmy Stewart, took the country in a landslide. Steve was asked during the conventions if he wanted a VP role but he turned it down. Stewart didn’t need his help and to be frank, he thought himself too old. 

And there was still work to do. 

In 1984 the first regular commercial tourism flights opened up between between the U.S and the U.S.S.R. It was also the first time the Zero Matter Transmitters at NASA got a response. It was simple and uncoded.

“OKAY WE GET IT , SO LIKE, HOW DO WE DESTROY INFINITY STONES?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Freedom Budget was ...very cool https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/a-freedom-budget-for-all-americans-annotated/557024/
> 
> JImmy Stewart cause he was actually a decorated war hero who came back and did movies unlike another ...actor turned president 
> 
> So! Do you know know who Arnie Roth is? He;s Captain America's Canonically Gay Friend! https://uproxx.com/entertainment/captain-america-gay-best-friend-arnold-roth/
> 
> He's about the same as gay politician/activist Harvey Milk so I thought ...perfect combo 
> 
> the destruction of the NEw Deal Coalition is a big thing! and its mostly from uhh racists breaking away due to civil rights and unions breaking away cause of the Vietnam war. BUt if the Vietnam war never happens and in fact the cold war doesn't happens wellllll 
> 
> Peggy is a year younger than Thatcher, so.....


	6. Curtain Call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes it takes a while for a plan to come together.

In 1985 Steve personally appointed a young SSR recruit, Philip Coulson, as the head of the “Captain America Hot Line”, a call in service where people could leave messages about problems in their neighborhoods. Steve used it to keep tabs on any possible super-threats but also to gauge the general temperature of the nation and where to send political effort.

Later that year, asset manager Nicklaus J. Fury was nominated SSR Head and won with 5 out of 6 votes. With Steve retired, Howard working on Roxxon’s Biosphere Repair Project, and Peggy currently Prime Minister of the U.K, they needed for new blood. 

Steve was getting old. The serum had slowed his aging and gave him a good head of a hair and thick white beard for 67, but it was hard not to be aware of it when you ran into younger versions of your friends. For this reason and others, he tried to stay out of the lives of the people he knew from back in the future. He met teenage Tony Stark a few times, but enough to know that he had a troubled adolescence being smoothed over by his close relationship with his mother, Maria, Howard’s 3rd wife. He wanted to go into medical research and Steve pitched the idea of expanding SSR to include a blue-sky medical science wing. Something where they wouldn’t have to worry about markets or profitability, just helping people. 

The Stark Institute started applications in 1987 for the best and brightest in medical research. All projects would be publicly funded and owned, all patents belonging to the people of the United States Of America on loan to the world in perpetuity. As Steve reminded them, it's what Salk did when he cured Polio. Tony’s first project involved mediating brain damage from extended comas or coup contrecoup injury.

Steve spent the 90s mostly in retirement. He was still active, no one appeared on TV more or gave blistering speeches as many times as him, but it was a ceremonial role. He was a totem, The Last Original New Dealer, a relic of the time when the country could’ve gone one way but went another. It was a role he was oddly prepared for. His last major campaign was the breakup of the private investment banking system following the Savings and Loan Crisis and the creation of the Public Bank that the Freedom Budget had demanded years ago anyway, From his house in Brooklyn Heights, he boxed, he made breakfast, he read books, he wrote magazine articles, and he waited for his plan to end.

He answered the the Zero Matter Transmitter question with an equation that took half as much time to arrive thanks to the work of high school wunderkind recruit Jane Foster.

In 1999 Steve was present at the U.N for the announcement of a planned US and United Democratic Russian Republics return to the Moon to establish a permenant base . Steve sent memos to SRR and UDRR on the importance of expanding outward for planetary defense. 

In 2004, Natasha Romanoff, a journalist affiliated with the new ‘Peace, Soildairty, And Freedom” party, uncovered evidence of a war-era mind control and assassin program to brainwash war orphans into killing machines. Past governments denied all involvement, but increasing testimony from supposed former “Black Widow” agents forced their hand into a proper internal inquiry. It was a sensational and upsetting reminder of the days when HYDRA agents were hidden under every bed. Romanoff became the projected favorite to run for her region’s seat.

The same year Hope Van Dyne went to work with her father Hank Pym on perfecting the miniaturization project for SSR’s push to beat the deadline for the Moon Base project.

In 2006, Dr. Bruce Banner, alongside his wife Betty, develop a new way to control seizures, shocks, and epileptic fits while working for the The Stark Institute. 

Steve Rogers, Captain America, The Star Spangled Man, died in his sleep on May 5th, 2012 at age 99, one day after The Battle Of New York was supposed to happen.

In 2016, Dr. Stephen Strange received a package that they said they'd been holding onto for the last 40 years with instructions to deliver it now. 

It was a vintage Captain America novelty postcard. On the back it read, “You were right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More references hoo boy. The Cap's hotline thing is from the comics! 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this alternate history where Steve, in trying to stop Thanos, makes the entire world better and ..makes the US a social democratic state?. 
> 
> the Avengers never happens. Maybe it's better this way. the "battle of New York" date is the date oif the The Avengers world premiere

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on a fake spoiler I fell for before IW was released and I thought - wait no that's a GREAT IDEA.
> 
> Tags and characters to be expanded as they appear. Going for an atlas, Encyclopedia style explanation in the middle.


End file.
